A Search Engine for Your Site

A Search Engine for Your Site

If your site grows to include a large number of pages, no matter how good a job you do of making the site navigable, navigation can be made easier with a local search engine. You may want to consider acquiring such a tool for your site. Here are your options:

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  Install a free tool, such as the ICE indexer and search engine. Written by Christian Neuss and made available to anyone at no charge, ICE is written in the language Perl and is suitable for use on servers with up to several thousand documents. For a tutorial on installing and using ICE, see:
  

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  Some Web server software packages may come bundled with their own search engine. For instance, Microsoft’s SiteServer includes a search engine capable of indexing content on your own server as well as crawling other servers you wish to index.
  
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  You could acquire a commercial search engine. For instance, Infoseek markets its search engine under the “Ultraseek” brand name, and Altavista markets its engine as well. Fees for using these engines vary with the size of the site. Both vendors’ products are available for Unix or Windows NT servers. Both vendors offer evaluation copies of their products for free download and use during a limited evaluation period. Altavista also offers free use of their product to index sites with up to 3000 documents. Note that these products can be rather expensive; be sure to pursue any non-profit, governmental, or library discounts. See www.infoseek.com and/or www.altavista.com.
  
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  You could use Excite for Web Servers, an older version of the search engine used on the Excite service and available for a variety of versions of Unix servers. This tool is available for free and offers much of the functionality users of the global Excite service are used to. See: www.excite.com/navigate/download.html.
  

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  In lieu of installing a search engine on your site, you can leverage the index of a global search engine. For instance, Altavista allows a user to limit a search to a particular domain. For instance, to look for information on events at www.smallville.org, you would submit a search of the form events host:www.smallville.org. The search would return all pages in the index that have the word “events” from the Smallville Web site. In order to leverage the central index, you could install on your server a CGI script that appends the appropriate “host:” information to each query, after which the request is funneled to www.altavista.com for processing. Or you could accomplish this on the client side by using a “bookmarklet” in JavaScript. For details on how to implement this approach, see: